Welcome to Anton Rufus Green, born Sept 30th 2006. I hope I get to know you, and whether I do or not, I hope your life is filled with love, fun, and things of importance. And I hope that when you’re an adult, and move away from the town you went to college in, someone there misses you as much as I miss your dad. My best to your parents — don’t give them too hard a time. I’m sure they’re as lucky to have you as you are to have them.
This is an abstruse bleg. (Move along, move along, if you aren’t likely to want to talk about technical philosophy stuff.) [click to continue…]
If someone hinted two years ago that one day I would be eagerly awaiting the third season of a remake of Battlestar Galactica, my response would have been something like, “Get away from me, crazy person, because that is crazy, what you are saying to me.”
The original series ran in the late 1970s and was very, very dumb. Sure, it’s interesting to learn that bits of Mormon theology were embedded into the show. And I suppose some people will now be entertained by those vintage haircuts. But don’t be fooled by the sickly glow of nostalgia. The show was junk. Let’s put it this way: There was a robotic dog.
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Susan Linn from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood was just on the Chris Evans show (of all places) describing Walmart’s new website, on which kids can choose a bunch of toys to add to a list which Walmart will email to their parents. Evans clearly didn’t believe Linn’s description of the site, especially the bit where she says that when you reject a toy one of the elves says that the other elf will lose his job. I think Linn is terrific, but I, too, thought she must be making that bit up, despite, like Evans, having already heard the astonishing accents the elves have been given.
No. Try it. It really is unbelievable. Come on folks, defend poor old Walmart. What good could come of this for the wider world?
Yahoo! hosted a party the other day celebrating the third birthday of del.icio.us and the registration of its millionth user. I found out about it thanks to a listing on Upcoming. It was a fun reason to return to Yahoo! headquarters just a few days after Yahoo! Hack Day.
I just watched the “trailer for 300”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/300/, a film version of a “Frank Miller graphic novel”:http://www.amazon.com/300-Frank-Miller/dp/1569714029 (which I haven’t read) about the battle of Thermopylae. Looks like the core of it is a good old relentless battle in the spirit of “Zulu”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008PC13/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20. There’s also some stuff on Sparta and its amazing toughness, Persia and its big golden thrones, and ambassadors to Sparta standing unwisely close to large open pits. The Spartan tradition of compulsory homosexuality was less in evidence in the trailer. My feeling is that the likes of Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson are already drafting the flinty Op-Ed pieces they’ll publish the week the film comes out. They can add themselves to the “wide variety”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_Labe%21 “of people”:http://irelandsown.net/Nation.htm “who have been”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_Colombia inspired by the story of Thermopylae. It’s all about juggling the analogy to make sure that you get to be one of the lonely 300, and not the vast invading foreign army.
I’ve not been blogging much of late, partly because I’ve been making the transition between being on leave and getting back to teaching, a transition that involves desperately trying to get one lot of stuff finished whilst hurriedly updating the things that you last had to think about nearly two years ago. One such is “my final-year global justice course”:http://eis.bris.ac.uk/%7Eplcdib/tj.html , which is the usual compromise between things I really think they ought to know about and things that I want to talk about. The main changes have been the inclusion of a lot more material on territory, borders, immigration and the like (weeks 9 and 10), at the expense of things that they should know about already (TJ). (The lecture/seminar distinction, btw, is a little bit artificial on this course and basically distinguishes between teaching hours where I introduce the discussion and ones where students do.) Anyway, it isn’t set in concrete, and I suddenly realized at the last moment that I don’t really know the secession literature at all. So those of you out there that do, or think there’s something else I’m neglecting, feel free to comment.
In mean-spirited response to the executive summary of a report I haven’t read, here is a bad-minded slap down. Pew,the people who write generally solid reports on US Internet usage, ‘surveyed 742 top technology thinkers and stakeholders and gave them a series of “future scenarios” involving the internet and digital technologies to comment on in order to get a consensus on the future’.
And this is what the cheerleading tech crowd believes will happen by 2020:
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By my reckoning, Denny Hastert’s “Galbraith Score”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/22/livingstone-campbell-galbraith/ is “now”:http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/061003/3hastert.htm “two”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/010153.php . Any bets on whether he’ll stick it out for the grand slam?
Update: We’re now at “three”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/washington/05cnd-hastert.html?hp&ex=1160107200&en=ed644f3ba9b42abf&ei=5094&partner=homepage
The “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ea2a206c-51e4-11db-bce6-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=e676331a-4bb0-11da-997b-0000779e2340.html writes about a ‘meltdown’ in the online gambling sector, thanks to new US legislation.
The online gambling sector was in meltdown in the UK on Monday morning, as the fallout from last week’s moves in the US to tighten anti-gambling laws sent shockwaves through the sector. Legislation passed in Washington on Friday would outlaw the processing of bets taken on-line by banks and credit card companies. The act now only requires the signature of the US president to bring it into effect, a move which is expected in the next two weeks. The bill prohibits US gamblers from using credit cards, cheques and electronic fund transfers to make online wagers, and throws the high-risk industry – already damaged by the impact of arrests of executives on US soil – into turmoil. One person in the industry said the bill was an attempt to “strangle the industry through the banks”. Companies based in the UK, Gibraltar and elsewhere are losing billions of dollars in their stock market valuations, because of their exposure to the US market.
People like “Christopher Caldwell”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/457bddcc-1363-11db-9d6e-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=e676331a-4bb0-11da-997b-0000779e2340.html take these kinds of measures as evidence that governments can indeed regulate the Internet, protect their citizens from nasty content etc etc. I used to more or less agree with them, but after thinking it through and doing some further research, I’m nowhere near as sure as I was. States are indeed able to use third party private actors as proxy regulators as they’re doing here, by pressing credit card companies and companies like Paypal into service as enforcers. They’ve been doing this for years on the state level (Eliot Spitzer pioneered this). But this kind of regulation-by-proxy really seems only to work well when the proxy regulators have real incentives to do what states want them to do, or when the ultimate targets of the regulation are big multinational companies tht don’t want to get caught breaking the law. But according to this “GAO report”:http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0389.pdf (PDF) it isn’t that difficult for offshore gambling companies to mask their transactions as ‘legitimate’ credit card transactions if they want to. Credit card companies don’t have either the means or the incentives to prevent this, as long as they _look_ as though they are trying to comply. So if I was to lay a bet,I’d lay substantial amounts of money that the new government legislation won’t put much of a dent in the willingness of US citizens to gamble on the Internet, or in the eagerness of offshore companies to make easy money by catering to this willingness. What _will_ happen is that the currently dominant multibillion dollar companies will lose control of the market to a congeries of small, shadier companies that are much more willing to cut legal corners than large, publicly quoted companies, because they have much less to fear from prosecution (few fixed assets, no corporate reputation to maintain etc).
The term “wingnut” gets thrown about rather loosely at times. But the life and work of former Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-Idaho) embodied all the richness and flavor that expression ought properly to convey. She died yesterday while bravely defying the nanny-state’s intrusive expectation that its charges wear seat belts.
Some highlights of her career are covered over at The Phil Nugent Experience:
Other Republicans had played footsie with the Turner Diaries crowd, but Chenoweth boldly remained attached to them even after the Oklahoma City bombing, an event that inspired her to the optimistic explanation, “Maybe now more people will listen!” Chenoweth married her admiration and concern for the militia groups with her other big obsession, the unspeakable horrors of eco-fascism. Having denounced environmentalism as a deranging form of religion that was at odds with the separation of church and state, she claimed that the government was using its secret black helicopters to terrorize hunters and protect endangered species…. She also, naturally, called for the impeachment of that awful Bill Clinton, but publically declared her support for her kind of world leader, Slobodan Milosovic.
Chenoweth was not simply another opportunist signing onto the “Contract with America” in 1994. “She was,” as Nugent puts it, “a 100% true believer, too radical to ever really accomplish anything and so sincere that you always knew just where you stood with her.”
Searching for a ray of light in the Foley gloom, Ramesh Ponnuru points us to a voice of calm:
Hugh Hewitt [Ramesh Ponnuru]
The House Republican Conference is sending around his take on Hastert’s role in Foley-gate.
Kathryn Lopez responds:
re: Hugh Hewitt [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
I often assume our friend actually works for the House Republican Conference, or RNC!
You know, when K-Lo thinks you’re kind of a hack…weelllll.
But what do Hewitt’s readers ‘think?’:
Thank you Hugh!
I first read the editorial by Dean Barnett and became “alot” annoyed! I did post my opinion of it on that comment section. So, I was so happy when I read your opinion because , well, it’s shared by me! The truth and facts about the Dim.s sickening dirty tricks are with us and we now have the FBI looking for hopefully truth/facts.
Indeed.
Maybe they should try $40 million. (via Atrios)
Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.
Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.
The Socialists won a surprise victory (or at least plurality) in the recent Austrian elections. The outcome appears to promise a departure from power for Jorg Haider, although the combined vote of the far-right parties was still 15 per cent, which is disappointing.
For CT election-followers, the outcome is of interest in another respect. According to the reports I’ve read, all the polls and all the pundits got this one wrong. So, if betting markets got it right, that would be pretty strong support for claims about the wisdom of crowds. But my (admittedly desultory) scan hasn’t produced any info. Can anyone point to market odds for this outcome?
Up here in Central New York, there are several close congressional races. So we’re being treated to a flood of TV advertising for the various candidates. You’d think it would be pretty easy to run a Democratic campaign these days. Just pick one of the “many things”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/10/2/202150/034 going wrong for Republicans and run with it. In the 25th CD, incumbent Jim Walsh is running TV ads on the “Elect me because I don’t vote for what George Bush wants” line. That would be _Republican_ incumbent Jim Walsh.
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